


Non Omnis Moriar

by hvrcules



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Brutality, But this is a serious fic so, Dark Rey, Dark Side Rey, Dark!Rey, Emotional Abuse, Essentially Rey And Her Pack Of Wolves, Evil Rey, Explosions, F/M, Han Solong lol, Hurt/Comfort, Jedi, LOTS of violence, Light Side, Light Side Ben Solo, Mental Abuse, Mental Illness, Multi, Padawan/Jedi Ben Solo, Physical Abuse, Role Reversal AU, Sith, Sith Rey, The Knights Of Ren need therapy, dark side, graphic descriptions of death, officially not incest kids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-06-01 02:40:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6497611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hvrcules/pseuds/hvrcules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?” </p><p>Sith!Rey AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Bad Beginning, Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stars, hide your fires. Let not light see my black and deep desires.

There is hunger crawling through her belly, thirst wrenching her throat and mouth dry, and someone watching her. Waiting for her to leave herself open.  Her tiny fingers tremble while pressing her haul for the day closer to her breast.

The outpost is only a faint speck of black against the sand-bright of the horizon.  The portions these scraps are worth will be everything she eats to-morrow, and Rey knows she has none left back home to cover the loss of them.

 

It is not the first time she has been challenged, but she is big enough that 20 tallies ago, Plutt gave her “independence” from his protection.  Help will not be coming again.

Today is not a day for weakness.  _Not today._ Rey is so tired, but the sand still shifts in the Graveyard, the wind still blows, the sun still beams down, harsh and unforgiving, and whoever is there is still there.  She almost wants to cry from the unfairness of it all.  She is too small to carry all this on her shoulders, she is too weak to manage the burden of her life against the the rest of the world. 

The soft scrabble of muffled footsteps reaches her sunburnt ears, and Rey steels herself once more.  Her body rises into action, almost of its’ own volition, her mind so close to giving up.  What she must do is unfair, but it is what she must do.  This life, this burden, is all she has.  Pushing loose strands of hair back into the knots that are the only thing she has left of ship that’s very existence was a balm to her loneliness and the feeling of being sandwiched in between two human beings who cared for her, truly, protected and safe.

The steps get louder, but she’s already secured her netted catch to her back, and grabbed hold of her staff, nearly twice her height, pulling herself up with the heavy bag behind her.

Rey counts heartbeats, thudding in her chest like a drum, in time with the sounds she can barely discern over the wind.

They get faintly louder.   _One, two, three-_

Rey runs.

 

A hand shoots out, clamping down over her mouth, forcing her back down into the sandy ground.  An elbow to her skinny ribs, knees pressing her abdomen down so she can’t get up, eyes watering as she fights, struggles, squirms, choking for air as large palms press her windpipe shut with the desperation of someone with nothing to lose.

And everything to gain.

Her hand finds the staff, smacking it into the side of the attacker’s head, but she is too weak, no muscle lining her intent.  The staff rolls away, down another dune, her grip too weak to maintain, her vision tunneling.

Rey cannot breathe, cannot draw in a single gulp of sand-laden air, the choked noises issuing from her mouth, hung open, echoing around with the ringing in her ears.  It is unfair.

This is not how she is going to die.

Something snaps.  A chasm opens in her mind, black and writhing released free from a cage she didn’t even realize existed, and within seconds, she can breathe. 

It is as if the world has opened itself up to her like a rare cacti, split open and dripping with life-sustaining moisture, only instead she is large enough to devour it whole.

Rey is invincible, in that moment, lying in the sand, blood just beginning to leak from a cut scraped into the top of her too prominent cheek bone.

 

Something dark and terrible moves her limbs, backed by an overwhelming drive to survive, and she struggles to her feet, bony arms clasped protectively over her abdomen, sweat sticking hair to her forehead, the back of her neck.

Rey stands.

 

She cannot make a single noise from her throat, soon to bruise black and blue, and every breath is sheer agony.  Her eyes blink heavily, sweeping sand away from where it collected near her eyes.

Rey stumbles as she walks, but the thing that came for her doesn’t move in her direction again.

In fact, it doesn’t even twitch.  She drops to the ground near the limp body on her scraped knees, _I’m alive_ playing a taboo in her ears.

A hand hovers over the mouth, the rest of the face covered in worn linen so she can’t even see who it was.  She waits a few expansively deadly silent moments, her gaze somehow stuck on the dirt threaded in between the ridges of her fingertips.

No breath stirs from the mouth, and as she rips the dirty cloth from the face, she can see the eyes, black with no white, frozen in death, the neck bent at such an angle as to leave no doubt in Rey’s mind the reason she is alive, and it is not.

It.

There are markings too, on its’ neck.  Where she has bruises, already yellowing, it has massive wounds, the smell of seared flesh lingering in the air, still sizzling smoke, two fingers in width, etched like a collar of gore and ruin.  An immature and entirely inappropriate pleasure rises in the back of her throat.  Rey has come out victorious.  Rey _won_.

 

The dark and terrible screams a glory cry in her mind, and for some reason, she is terribly, amazingly, incredibly happy.

She sees it, then.  It curdles her blood in her veins.

The insignia of Plutt, on a scrap of fabric all too familiar.

Everything at Plutt’s has a price.  Even death.

Rey touches it, the urge to vomit growing stronger with every passing second.  The cloth is too stiff, too hardy, for the typical cantina bar fight “accidents”.  Asbestos laden, which means Plutt expected her would-be assassin to have tracked her long enough to require a kill-contract to withstand even the fatal storms that covered entire Star Destroyers under thick layers of impenetrable sand.

It is unfair.

Her body knows what to do, when her mind has given up.

Rey numbly strips the corpse of all valuables, pocketing the damning shred of thick cloth, inscribed with her name, “kill”, and the signatures of both a man dead and a man whose death Rey can picture in her mind with no difficulty whatsoever, a morbid tableau to the feelings churning a sick poison in her hollow stomach.

 

Pain and weakness, hand in hand, feel like they lines her very bones, constricting her lungs with an iron solid grip, and tears budge at the corners of her eyes, reddened and scratchy.

Rey only makes it three steps away from what she has done, staff in hand, now clutched like it is the only thing that stands between her and utter ruin, scraps now combined with the scavenged clothing and metal bits sharp enough to end someone’s life.

 

She tries to lift her foot to take a fourth step, before she collapses on her knees, tears pouring down her face, not enough water left for her to spare to keep their saltiness from burning on their trails cascading down her cheeks.

It is unfair.

The darkness under her bunk is now the darkness in her mind.  It doesn’t scare her anymore, only wraps her consciousness in a blanket of softness, drowning her down into the depths of the crevices she’d opened within herself.  It soothes away Rey’s anguish, Rey’s pain, it takes the weakness she hates and turns into strength.  Still painful, still anguished, but strong.  Strong now.  Strong for now.

It pulls her down like quicksand, and she finds herself floating in a void.  So black, so big, it engulfs her.  Only a little flicker of pure, white light left.  Rey gets the strangest sensation that it used to be much bigger.  She looks past it, brushing it aside almost gently with unbelieving fingers, and goes deeper into the darkness.  It feels like a home.  It tastes like damnation.  She screams into it.

 

Something rises within, and Rey can see the shape moving towards her like smoke, curling herself into a little ball around the only speck of light that illuminates all the darkness she’s stumbled into.

  
The void screams back.


	2. The Bad Beginning, Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holy water cannot help you now. See I've come to burn your kingdom down. - Seven Devils, Florence + The Machine

She carries herself a little differently, now.  A new awareness, a new confidence, tingling down her arms, an energy straightening out her spine, defiance and power tilting her chin forward.  Rey is every bit her master’s apprentice; while he could have had a Skywalker, he chose her, and she vows with all the sincerity and earnestness a 12 year old can manage to make him proud.

Her master believes actions hold words true, and so far, she has managed to make every single word out of her mouth as true as the dawn in the sky overhead, the only time she can bear now to look upon the junkyard of the galaxy with any sort of favorable opinion.

The sun rises, beautiful and soft now, death bearing and merciless in half an hour, raining hell down on any poor unsuspecting traveler caught unaware and unprepared.

Something Rey in particular aspires to be.

_ As beautiful and as terrible as the dawn _ , Master agrees, his voice curling around her mind like a snake, slinking around the deepest corners of her consciousness.   _ An apt and fitting description, my apprentice. _

Rey bows her head, feeling the three tails she’s bound her hair into now shift with the movement.  The Supreme Leader told her that the knots were relics of her past, chains binding her to the memories of the people who cast her away like another of the condemned ships, rusting and stripped of all value, disintegrating into the sand and the nothingness.

 

In response, she sheared her hair short at the soonest opportunity, now keeping it back in the same distinctive shape,  _ so none will ever forget your face, Apprentice _ , but ripped away of the cowed, scared little girl Rey once was.

The next day, she traded a week’s worth of portions for a blowtorch and watched as the tallies on her wall melted into smooth, bumpy whorls of metal.

 

Besides, she doesn’t need to chisel in anymore marks.  He helps her count the days, now.  Rey isn’t alone any more, and he helps her.  He’s always there, always watching.  Rey thinks she might be scared of him, but he reminds her of the scavenger, lying lifeless in the sand, the black like tar swallowing her up and bringing her to him, the little light long forgotten.

 

The Master came to her that night, while she shivered alone, tears staining her cheeks, so afraid of what Rey’d unleashed within herself.  No portions that day; Plutt took her haul in payment for killing one of his best.  She had never felt such a desire before to see his sickly green blood spill into the sands, to hear him scream in agony and horror.  The soft little death cry of one’s last breath.  The dark and terrible energy refuses to rise to her command, and Rey turned away from his scrappy stall and his smug face, and trudged the long way back to her small shack of metal, buried in the Graveyard.

The wind whistled along the holes in the cloth she’d put up to keep out the worst of the violent gusts, and Rey was no longer alone.

 

She’d closed her eyes for one moment, just to savor the feeling, not even comprehending she might be in danger, and when she opened them, Rey was back in that void, the void that had stripped her soul bare and laid her mind open for it to look into.  For what end, she did not know.

It spoke now, rather than screaming.

It promised her all the things Rey’d ever wanted.  To never feel powerless.  To never feel alone.  To be guided, taught, like mothers and fathers were supposed to teach their children.  Only, the darkness said, she wouldn’t need a mother or a father, ever again.  Another thing, it promised.  To never be at the mercy of another, to stand on her own two feet from now until the day she laid her life down for her new Master.

 

The void spoke the truth, she convinced herself.  Rey trusted it more than anything, Rey wanted to never be powerless more than anything, she wanted never to be alone more than anything-

 

_ Be my apprentice, child. _

_ Yes. _

 

Under his guidance, the darkness comes to her as easy as breathing.  As easy as obeying.

 

He tells her it has been four years since that day.  Rey believes him.  She remembers the Master telling her that that day was the day she was reborn in the destruction she created.  Rey obsessively counted the tallies back from the 1460th day.  4 years.  Plus all the ones since.  Nearly another 1460 days.  Nearly 8 years.

When she asks, Plutt tells her she was 4 years old, when she was abandoned here.  He says so as if he hadn’t had a moment of peace since, as if for all that time, Rey has been nothing but a burden on him.  On his business.  Like he had good reason to send that thing to smother the life from her lungs.

Plutt said it like he regrets ever keeping her alive long enough to see this dawn, that now splits the sky above into ribbons of soft gold, shades of colors Rey doesn’t even know the names of ( _ Peach,  _ he whispers.   _ Cornflower.  Marigold. _ )

 

Master chuckles when she remembers this.    _ Congratulations.  You have lived to your twelfth year.  In return, for your faithfulness, for your loyalty I will give you what you most want.   The filth’s head.  Burn the body.  Then come to me, and we shall begin your training.  If you cannot accomplish the task I have assigned you, remove your own head and cleanse yourself of the sin of your failure.  Do not falter.  The choice is yours.  You have until sunset. _

 

He has never spoken to her for so long.  Rey can almost physically feel how exhausted her brain is from the strain.

She gathers herself up from her perch outside the metal shack, brushing the sand from her clothes as she goes inside.  Rey hesitates only for a moment in front of the knife she’d fashioned herself, out of sharpened metal, the handle wrapped in thick layers of cloth to keep her from slicing herself open on the edge.  She swiftly tucks it into her belt.

_ I’m almost tall enough to match the doorframe _ , she thinks as she leaves, looking around the room for one last time.   _ This will be the last time I’ll ever see this.   _

Outside in the hot sun, Rey grabs the staff, the end of it only a few inches above her head now.   _ Look at how I’ve grown. _

She stomps the sentimentality out of her mind as quickly as a twelve year old can, and focuses on the trial at hand.

 

_ I will not fail you.  I swear it. _

 

-

 

Plutt sits in his booth, carrying on business, as if nothing is wrong.  As if he has done no wrong.

 

The fury boils within her, now lined with the unmovable steel of righteousness.

_ He deserves this _ , Rey tells herself.   _ He tried to kill you _ .   _ He deserves this. _

She hears voices hissing in her ears, all other unimportant sounds blocked out by something too ancient and arcane for her to truly understand, but Rey hears what the voices want.  What  _ he _ wants.

 

_ Do it. _

 

Still only twelve years old, and Rey is so eager to please.  In spite of whatever pathetic objections her shattered moral compass may have created, it is all too easy to lash intent around his blubbery neck and drag him from his seat, the thick safety bars ripped open as if parchment.

 

The darkness issuing from her outstretched hands bring the man to heel at her feet, like one of the beasts the junklords use to haul goods to the marketplace, a collar of storm and electricity lashing a brand into his body and positioning him just so as to give her knife the past of least resistance.

 

The Master is watching.

 

Instinct wills her to twitch her bony fingers just so.  The lightning moves now, curling into his mouth and plastering his tongue to the roof of his mouth so he cannot speak, saliva joining his tears in a steadily dampening spot below his jiggling chins.

The fear in his eyes is intoxicating.  Rey cannot remember what it feels like to have a belly full of warm food and as much clear water as she can drink,  _ but,  _ she thinks,  _ perhaps this is it. _

She kneels down to almost his level, for the first time being able to look down upon Plutt like all the years he has look down at her.  Looked down at all the people he’s forced into bargaining for their lives.

Rey allows herself a few moments to enjoy the terror in his watery, yellow eyes, the sound of his muffled screams as he begs for a life he should never have been given.

She will take it from him, instead.

 

There is light rippling behind her eyes.  It wants her to stop.  It wants to go home.  It wants her family.

Rey reminds herself.   _ This is what I want. _

A harsh blink stifles it without mercy, and it is gone from her memory and her sight as quickly as it came.

 

Her knife saws through his neck, clumsily ripping open the arteries that lie just beneath the creamy white fat that lines his grey neck, dousing her in his dirty green blood.  Rey’s grip becomes slippery from the quantity of the thick liquid, but she clenches her teeth and holds the weapon tighter.

She is so far gone.

She cannot go back.

 

It is just Rey, and the knife, and Plutt, now.  The voices have gone silent.  The world around her blurs to nothing.

His head tumbles forward into the sand with a heavy thud.  Rey can see the jagged edges of his flesh where she was too weak to manage a clean cut, his eyes rolled back in his head, foam gathering at the corners of his mouth, permanently seared open.

 

Plutt is dead.

 

She hears a battle cry.  A symphony.   _ Victory _ .  The childish pleasure of four years ago beckons again.  Rey knows better now than to act like she does not take such joy from this brutal act.

  
_ You’ve done so well, my child _ .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 0-100 real quick are we right. We'll try to have chapter 3 up tomorrow (in time for Daisy's birthday). No Kylo yet, but don't worry fam, we gotchu.


	3. Interlude I: Ben Solo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He says it's mine to give, but it's yours to choose. You gonna sink or swim, you gonna learn the truth. No matter what you do, you're gonna learn the truth." - Bartholomew, The Silent Comedy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for self harm, suicidal thoughts. this takes place around the same day Chapter I takes place. In that, Rey was 8, and in this, Ben is 17. hope you guys like it and that it fits in/makes sense with the plotlines we've already put in place.

Grandfather stopped speaking to him.  He’s tried so hard to bring him back, to prove he’s worthy of him, of the blood in his veins, of the Force he calls his own.  The only person who really, truly, knew the truth of him and under-stood him, gone.

The self-loathing in his throat boils over, and it takes every ounce of self restraint Ben has ever had to keep himself from collapsing into a sobbing wreck, a pitiable and despicable creature.

 

_ What did I do?  What did I do?  What did I do? _

 

It’s his fault.  He knows it.  Ben wonders for the ten millionth time if he returned his uncle’s greeting to happily, if it was the light conversation he’d made with the classmates he’d vowed to strike down with his own saber at dinner last night, the crude joke he’d barely managed to keep a chuckle down from, that had convinced his Master that he had too much of his father in him to ever, ever, ever be worthy.

 

Ben had even done like he’d been taught to do;  _ If you have committed a sin against yourself, atone for your sins on yourself, and you will truly show the depth and sincerity of your regret and repentance.  I expect nothing less from you, prodigy of Skywalker blood. _

 

The scabbing over marks and open, sluggishly bleeding wounds, crawling up his arms and the planes of his ribs, etched into his scalp like some grotesque painting, attested to that.

 

One minute, he was drowning in the deep well of power, the world around him muffled by the thrumming of the Force that crackled and lept with every suppressed emotion he released at the wall of his room, practicing, training, all for Grandfather and all for the Master.  Ben was strong.  Ben could stand tall and proud and confident, because he was something.

The next, it was like a veil had been ripped from Ben’s eyes, and now he could see more clearly illustrated the harsh realities of the limits of his clumsy, too-tall body and gangly limbs, the energy he once valued like the breath in his lungs mere peanuts compared to the galaxies his uncle commanded.  A pathetic, whimpering, sentimental child wailing in the body of a boy-not-yet-a-man.

He was nothing.

 

Oh, how he’d cried, wept, screamed back out into the dark space that once comforted him like bacta on the sores in his soul, but now suffocated him like a cast set around an already mended broken bone, ready to be free, itching to move without restraint.

Ben finds that this cast is inescapable, that it presses him back into his misery and his beaten down resolve and his broken vows and the knowledge of all the ways he has failed, and refuses to let him mend.  Refuses him to rebreak the bone to let it heal better, but remain in the unending agony that only a person can create for themselves.

 

Luke, the old fool, tried to rouse him from his bunk to attend  _ meditation _ , only to be beaten back by flickering lights, shifting furniture, the Force poisoning the air with a taste like battery acid, and the feral, raw look in Ben’s haunted, sleepless eyes.

As soon as he’d shut the door behind him, Ben had turned onto his side and dry retched air until tears trailed down his hollow cheeks and he collapsed back into the bed, utterly spent, muscles spasming and cold shivers dancing down his spine while his forehead burned magma hot.

He’d turned in his bed, still quivering like a beaten animal in a too small cage, and smashed the unprotected flats of his palms into the corrugated metal of the wall, forcefully dragging them down in such a way that tore the skin from Ben’s nimble fingers and left crimson smeared into the gunmetal gray.

 

Grandfather stopped speaking to him.

 

He wonders if he bleeds enough, rips away enough flesh that had doomed him from a path into greatness and glory to a sad, slow, downwards spiral of obscurity and disappointment ( _ just like your father _ , a traitorous thought hisses), maybe Grandfather will come back.

Death now seems preferable from the vicious assault his own psyche has launched against him, words, feelings, hatred, all sinking straight through his paper-thin skin, his failing muscles, his porcelain delicate bones.

Ben is a ruin of person, by his own hand.

 

The food Luke sends to the room gets smashed against the corridor outside, along with the little, annoyingly happy, annoyingly cheerful, annoyingly content droid that came with it.

The blood on his wall dries to a crusty, metallic smelling stain.  Hours later, Ben is so far gone he doesn’t even notice it, he who so meticulously tended to his quarters that moving a single stand or lamp a centimeter out of place was enough to send him into a furious rage.

Now, he cannot even muster the energy to raise a limb aching with the phantom soreness of some great, bodily struggle, much less summon up the syrupy thick anger that had fueled him only a day ago.

Unbidden, he remembers his deadbeat father reminding him to make sure that his old bucket of bolts had enough fuel to rattle on another day.

The comparison is accurate enough.  Both are pieces of scrap and collapsing parts barely held together by old joints and sheer force of will, ready to collapse at the slightest provocation.

 

Cool hands press into his brow, and he feels his body being moved through the air ever so gently, care laced into the gesture so heavily even Ben could sense it from the cavern of his mind that he’d retreated into, for the first time in his recallable memory, completely and utterly alone.

 

_ Come back,  _ he sobs, like a small child frightened of the dark.   _ Come back to me.  Don’t leave me alone.  Please.  Please.  Come back. _

 

When he wakes, Ben sees both his mother and Luke sitting by the starched white of his medbay bed, red rimmed eyes and shoulders heavy with the weight of the galaxy shared between them.

“Ben,” They start.  “We know.”

 

He says nothing.  Bitter rises up at them, at these people who swore they loved him unconditionally, vowed that his uncle would guide him down the right path and his mother and father would support him no matter what.

 

_ You left me alone in the dark, and the only person who ever stayed was Grandfather.  And now?  Now, even he has gone. _

 

Ben shifts in such a way so he might turn away from them, the gaping hole in the back of his scratchy hospital gown sliding open to reveal red lines where he tried to claw himself out of his own epidermis.  Luke shifts uncomfortably in his seat.  He hears the sound of his mother quickly wiping away tears that must have gathered at the sight.

_ Let them be uncomfortable _ , the part of him still frozen at childhood whispers pettily.   _ Let them see what they did to me. _  The childish satisfaction at such an insubstantial attempt at immature revenge is stronger than Ben would’ve thought.

 

“My son...”  Mother’s voice, heavy with unshed tears, and true, true sadness and regret, is enough to shatter any pleasure he might’ve taken from making her cry.  Her fingers hesitantly hover over his arm, wrapped in fresh bandages.  When he was younger, she’d always tug him with her this way and that, never asking him if he wanted her to hug him or hold his hand or grip his elbow, never considering Ben might be able to walk on his own.

 

“No.”  Her fingers retreat.

“We’re so sorry, Ben.  We failed you.  I failed you.  I shouldn’t have-”

“-sent you away,”  His uncle’s voice steps in, in tandem.  “We understand if you hate us.”

Hate is never a word Luke has spoken so delicately, and without malice.  He says “hate” now as if he might even understand a fraction of the hurricane that whirls through Ben Solo now.

A silence passes before either of the three parties speaks.

 

“I don’t.”  His voice is raspy with disuse, and much steadier than his fists clenched into the blankets that drape over him.

 

“If you would like,”  Mother murmurs delicately, “I can take you back home.”  She acts like Ben has a choice.

She should’ve asked him ten years ago.

“Where’s Father?”  There is palpable anger coloring his tone, but neither her nor Luke reprimand him.  He stares harder at the blank curtain that gives him some small measure of privacy in the medbay that through using the Force, he can tell is empty of patients.

“Your Father is back in Hosnian Prime.  I told him to stay back.  I didn’t think you wanted to see him.”

“I don’t.”

“I thought so.”

Ben shifts in his bed once more so he can look his mother in the eye, the sheets tangling around him in disarray.  No one tells him to straighten them out.

“Your mother and I talked.  There is another way...”  Luke trails off.

“What he’s saying that if you’d like to go back, if you’d like to attend the academy back on Hosnian Prime and be a civilian or a soldier or whatever the hell you want to be, you can.  If you want to stay here with Luke and learn how to use the Force, you can do that too.”

His jaw tenses.  Ben doesn’t speak, only stares the both of them down, trying to judge with his own two eyes the truth in their words.  They don’t ask him to respond.  He doesn’t owe them one.

“I accept my responsibility in driving you towards this, Ben, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to redeem myself fully from failing you so, but we were hoping that you might allow me to teach you once more.  A different path.  You were always so balanced, and I never accepted that.  I see the error in my ways.  We were never meant to be truly Light or Dark, but rather the Gray in between.”

It is more than he could have ever hoped, dreamed, wished for.  The things, the love they’re promising are pipe dreams, trying to bridge over holes too deep and gaps too wide, resentments too old and aches too strong.  Ben knows they can see the doubt, the mistrust, maybe even the sliver of cautious hope in his eyes.  He’s always hated how expressive his eyes were.

Luke continues on.

“Now, let me accept you.”

“Yes.”


	4. The Mountain Of Adamant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "they used to shout my name, now they whisper it" - Lorde, Yellow Flicker Beat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you see those tags we put in the story's main listing? here's where a few of them start to come into play.

The Finalizer is unlike any ship she’s seen before, gleaming sleek and obsidian as it smoothly moves through hyperspace.  Clean, not a speck of rust even on the ‘fresher which took Rey weeks to learn to operate.  Worth more portions than there were on the whole of Jakku.  The engines growl a low hum in the background, an insistent rhythm that leaves her wide awake the first night Rey spends on board.

She is rewarded the next morning by entire galaxies of bruises and open cuts that litter her body, sleep deprivation contributing to an already distracted mind during her first sparring practice aboard the monolith Master commands her to call home.  That is the last time Rey ever deigns to keep herself awake through the night, even as through the weeks that turn into months that turn into years, her dreams grow darker, taste more bitter, foggy with pain and shapes that scream in the black and prey on her defenseless mind like vultures.

The Supreme Leader tells her that they show her true potential, that the more frightening they get, the more powerful in the Dark side of the Force she becomes.  Rey hopes he is right; sometimes it feels as if she hasn’t woken up from some night terror at all, only the terror has extended its toxic grasp into her waking world and bound Rey into an eternal state of fear and self-loathing, ever cold, ever lonely, ever dark.

Tit for tat.  Nothing is unfair anymore; to get, she must give.  That is the way of the Force.

 

The troopers, clad in the most spotless, smooth white armor Rey had ever seen, had descended upon Niima the instant she’d separated Plutt’s head from his body.  It was too much for her, for her overtaxed mind; the bleach white bodies dispatching any who came within a ten foot radius with mechanical precision, contrasted with the dusty, desperate souls who clawed at them like wild animals in murky reds and sand oranges, covered in grime and filth.

And in the center of it all, the (wrong) green turning brown in the ground beneath Rey’s feet, the viscous liquid drying to a powdery crust on her hands, sinking into her palms so deep she’d never be able to get it all out, and an overwhelming want for some feeling of warmth and kindness and something more she’d never been able to put a name to.

A musty bag made up of rough brown cloth was thrust over her head, her senses too overwhelmed for Rey to do much of anything but let them take her in stunned silence, limbs cooperating as they pulled her this way and that.  An undeterminable amount of time later, and the darkness of the interior of the blindfold gave way to the darkness of the Finalizer.

 

This new life is entirely unlike Jakku in every way, and the unfamiliarity has her reeling out of orbit, a planetary body knocked into deep space by a stray asteroid.  It swallows her whole, strips her of everything that made her Rey, and is in the process of turning her into something.  She’s not entirely sure what that something is.

Rey isn’t homesick, she’s assured herself many times before, simply... out of her element.  That’s a nice phrase to describe it; she first heard it  in her most recent tutoring session with one of the pale faced, gaunt, black cloaked officers.  Master may tolerate an uncivilized apprentice, but never a dumb one.

Out of her element, implying Rey might one day acclimate to her new habitat and thrive here like she never has before.  Thrive is not a word she uses often, even though the Supreme Leader assures her Rey is doing so here.

The food is odd, rich and thick as it slaps against the bowl, real gruel, boiled in real water, little clumps of some unstirred white powder bursting against her tongue as she slurps it down as gracefully as one of the banthas Rey saw snaps of in a holovid.  She near refused to touch it the first time someone set it down in front of her, too used to being given rotten portions on purpose and water too sour to drink back at Niima, only a gentle suggestion from the Supreme Leader assuring her it was safe and the foreign feeling of somehow  _ needing _ to eat this specific meal, like someone forced the craving into Rey’s body, finally convincing her to touch it.

_ Eat, apprentice.  I have no need for a student who weakens themselves at every turn and sabotages their own intent. _

She never refused a bowl again, chastised plenty by that single missive.

 

The training is hard, but they say it is helping, so she believes them.  The Supreme Leader drives her as hard as the pig did, but Rey knows it is for the best.  He could’ve had an apprentice of Skywalker blood, but he picked her instead.  She was abandoned by everyone else who had sworn to care, but Rey would rather have her skull smashed open than disappoint the only person who ever made good on their promises.

Two years have passed like the stars whirling overhead in hyperspace, and she frightens the cadets in training with the intensity in which with she throws herself into everything she attempts.  So old, yet not old enough.

 

They keep her too busy to remember the sun and the sand, the warmth that had made a home in her bones, the loneliness, the taste of hard water and portion bread, when she was 7, slicing her back open on the ragged edges of a torn ship hull when she slipped from her unstable perch-

The smell of Unkar Plutt’s blood as it sealed her fate.

 

_ My child, you are without limitations.  Boundless in all you do.  Show them. _

 

Supreme Leader’s approval only furthers her ambitions to please, and she works even harder at the daily laps, the sparring against battle droids, cadets in training, throwing her adamant will against the physical limits of her body and succeeding in breaking them, all for him.  He adds new things to her repertoire when he sees how quickly Rey devours all the knowledge that is placed in front of her; torture resistance, mind-stripping, interrogation.

 

_ Pain is weakness leaving the body _ , she says to herself. _  Pain is weakness leaving the body.  Pain is weakness leaving the- _

 

Of course, she must give in order to receive.  Nothing is free, nothing is unfair, and now she trades the sanity of her mind for the strength of her limbs.

The pig’s head stares at her now in her dreams, the eyes taking in the last image before death, wide in the face of the inevitable end, his breaths coming not from his mouth, but from the jagged gash in his windpipe, widening with each ragged inhale.

Rey tries and uses the Force, use her body as the weapon it’s been honed into, but he won’t stop staring at her.

She swears she can feel him watching her, even as she gets up and rubs away sleep-dust from the corners of her eyes and notices how pale she’s gotten in the single, small mirror they allow her in the refresher.

Her freckles stand out now, against the bland facade of her face, purple circles no amount of unsatisfactory rest could erase painting themselves under her eyes, no extra fat padding the hollows of her cheeks like Rey had expected would happen.

Rey’s a little taller now, according to her last measurements and weigh in.  She looks none the different; knobby elbows, ribs poking out of her sides, the ridges of her spine visible like some arcane beast.  Only ridged scars, all twisted and thick like the rivers she sees covering the planets they orbit, trailing up her back, the little white lines on her hands where she scrubbed too hard trying to get all the green off, taking most of her skin with it.

She hates the color green, now.

Rey looks different, Rey feels different, Rey is different, and she is proud of it.

Nothing is free.

After the last time she’d woken up, screeching, beating her knuckles bloody against the knobbed walls of her room, shredding the thin linen sheets with her too long fingernails, anything, anything to remind her which world was the real one and which one only existed in her head, Rey had been given a retainer.

 

XI-3197.  The only Trooper she’s ever seen unmasked, and only because Rey had commanded it so.  The young woman stands a good deal taller than her, hair black to match the metal of the ship, skin almost as blank as the white armor she wore everyday without fail.

Only at night did XI-3197 ever have a need for it.

 

_ My dear child, the others are not worthy of your presence.  Remember, Rey, who you are.  Hold yourself above them all.  Familiarity breeds malcontent.  You are not to take any meals with the commoners.  Your retainer will bring them to you.  Stay to your current training regime.  Come when I summon you, and I shall tutor you personally.  Otherwise, I bid you to remain in your quarters. _

 

It would be a lonely existence, but XI-3197 is there to hold her down when she gets violent, and bring, her her food and holobooks so she doesn’t fall behind on her studies, and put bacta patches on her wounds, and for Rey, that is enough.

Sometimes she’ll even talk, when Rey is required to practice her skills of conversation and spoken word, and she finds she enjoys those lessons more than Rey’d ever let on.

 

The Supreme Leader dissects her mind like an onion, peeling back each layer after layer until he finds the one he’s looking for, teaching her through the revelation of her own mind what the Force can do.  It shouldn’t bother her; she has nothing to hide, nothing to show, nothing that Rey would like to keep to herself.  He promised her everything if she gave herself to him, and she shouldn’t have a problem with it.

She’s always hated being alone both in her own mind and in the real world around her, right?

The punishment for these thoughts is long and drawn out, indescribable yet tangible enough to leave her quivering in fear at mere reminders of such an ordeal, but Rey welcomes them.  If she did something wrong, then she must atone.  That is fair.

The vague distaste of those lessons leaves a bitter edge in her mouth, and it is one she swallows down with as much cold water as her belly can hold as soon as she returns to her quarters.

Her scars have doubled now.

 

The worst of her punishments are more subtle than the skin deep.

 

_ The child of the Skywalker bloodline would’ve blocked that. _

 

_ The Skywalker would’ve mastered that by now.  Try harder. _

 

_ Skywalker could have found the information much faster.  You disappoint me. _

 

_ Pain is weakness leaving the body _ , she tells herself, but Rey has never felt weaker than four times a week when she stumbles back to the little section of the galaxy that she likes to think is solely hers, blood staining her uniform, muscles giving out under her meager body weight.

 

There are only three rooms she is allowed; a room for a bed comprised of a thin mattress, a singular pillow, and three blankets, the refresher, and a personal training chamber, the training chamber added only after the Leader’s decree.

Where once she returned to merely rest her head and to remove the grime and blood and dust of the day, Rey comes to know them and their vents and the seams in the ceiling and the little corners where dust sometimes collects most intimately.  

She doesn’t know where XI-3197 goes to sleep, and Rey finds she doesn’t care, as long as she always comes back.

 

Rey only ever sends her away after the worst of her weekly lessons leave her feeling so raw and exposed that she would be tempted to rip out XI-3197’s heart in order to spare herself the sensation of another’s presence in the Force.  She prefers to be alone in her agony, just her, and the silence, and the stars, never judging the moment Rey gives in to her weakness and lets herself weep and curl up like the child she swears she isn’t anymore.

She is old enough now to know that not every promise she makes to the Supreme Leader can be fulfilled.

The Comm Hall designated for her Master is as cavernous as it is dark, and it is so easy for Rey to feel swallowed up in it, like the first time she’d ever touched the Dark.  Her thoughts tug at her will, begging to wander, but the fear of the last time Rey allowed them to do so keeps them in place.

  
“Abraxim.  You know of the revolution that rages on the planet’s surface.  The Order has pledged their support to a faction, and so has Skywalker and his ilk to another.  General Hux says that recent communications tells us that Skywalker plans on sending a troop of untrained Padawans to aid their cause, naive enough to think they alone will halt this civil war.  Go, apprentice, strike every Padawan down, and I will permit you to begin construction on your lightsaber.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things are starting to happen...
> 
> (abraxim is an outer rim planet, fyi)


	5. Abraxim Chainsaw Massacre Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Wrong, I know, killing someone. Gets a little easier, when you've done it once." - Lana Del Rey, Kinda Outta Luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You see all those tags.  
> They're there for a really good reason.  
> Those are the warning labels on this tin, and this chapter is exactly what it says on the tin.  
> Anyways, hvrcules will be away for the majority of next week so we pushed out a really long chapter to make up for our future absence. Thank you for joining us on the highway to Hell. (for reference, Rey is now 14, and Ben is now 19)

Rey wants to know what Jedi blood smells like.  It will be different from the scent of the pig’s, she is sure of it.  That smelled of thick and heavy, a sulfuric tang like something gone sour, just sour enough to scare off anyone so starved they might attempt to eat it.

She’s been caught in that very same position too many times to mark.

Perhaps it will be akin to that of the scavenger’s blood, the creature she’d punished for attempting to take her life away like she was nothing.  Spots of moisture, not relieving in the slightest,  on sun parched skin, a quick brush of iron mineral when wafted towards her nose.

When spilled, would it be as perfect as the Ben that the Master spoke of in such reverent tones?

 

Some small shred of her conscience objected fiercely to all of this business, bile rising in her throat from the wrongness at what she was doing, pangs running through her chest at the notion of that much blood covering her hands, but it always did that.  Rey supposed it was some small weakness she had yet to destroy, yet to overcome, and ignored it, as per status quo.

 

_Pain is weakness leaving the body.  And though it may be painful, I will stamp out this one like all the others._

 

These are the things that occupy her thoughts on the way back to her small rooms, her strides slowing down so that Rey might better take advantage of the rare time she gets outside of her quarters.  She suspects that after what will happen next, Rey will not wish to see anything beyond her three chambers for a good measure of time.

Her door slides open with subtle hiss, and Rey moves into the room before it manages to shut closed on the ends of the cape she drapes around her narrow shoulders, to ward off the perpetual chill.

The whole of the narrow boxes are lit harshly with white, not a single color to relieve the monochrome of the walls and the ceiling and the bed.  Rey likes it this way; she can bear her existence a little longer without bright things cluttering up her space and her brain.  The world is a bit too complicated for her to stand with her self control so minimal to begin with, much less when the leash Rey puts on her self destruction begins to fray.   _Onyx.  Bleach.  Heather._

Everything is still orderly, precisely a certain amount of inches away from each other, not a fixture or lamp tilted askew.

The order washes away the blood on her mind like clear water, but the stain is still there.

 

“When I get back from my mission, XI-3197, take pains to ensure that no lights are left on.”

“Yes, my lady.”

 

XI-3197 knows this, and like any good pet, goes and knocks down the setting by a few notches.  Her pupils adjust to the difference, and Rey exhales her turmoil into the frigid air.

 

She wonders when exactly she became so ancient-feeling and world weary; back on Jakku, Rey was one of the few sentient organisms younger than two decades still alive.  Back then she could traverse hours under blinding hot sun without so much of a blink, the reds and the yellows and the browns almost painful in their vibrancy but never quite so, energy forcing her to get up in the morning on an empty stomach and a child’s stamina.

Now, Rey could drop dead at the very instant and merely feel like she was entering into some well deserved rest, so deep that she would never awaken.  She doesn’t want to awaken.  Rey wonders what exactly is she more tired of; this responsibility, this pressure, this unobtainable goal of _Skywalker, Skywalker, lightsaber, lightsaber_ -

The thought is allowed to be entertained for all of two seconds before the scars on her back pulse hotly.

_The Skywalker boy would never mope-_

It isn’t the Master’s voice that speaks such things to her anymore.

 

“Well?”  XI-3197’s voice interrupts her and Rey reflexively moves into position to give herself a perfect shot at the soldier’s neck, even under all the armor.  A clean break, maybe a bit of a twist to silence her all the faster.  It wouldn’t be unfair in the slightest, merely a master putting down a misbehaving dog.

The venom that rose so quickly within Rey makes her pause for a moment, blinking softly as she barely manages to rein it in.

“Abraxim.”  It comes out harsher, sharper than she intended, but Rey doesn’t care enough to apologize as XI-3197 recoils away from her, recognizing her lady’s whiplash temperament.

 

“We’ve picked a side, it appears.  And so has the Resistance.”  Nothing more than a mere reliving of the days of the Alliance, yet dangerous and overarching enough to have a presence on an Outer Rim territory long sworn allegiance to the Order.  Enough to warrant the presence of the Supreme Leader’s personal apprentice, the weapon in his arsenal he has worked the hardest sharpen and forge through the fires of the Dark.

 

This petty squabble between the government and the people who would see it torn down isn’t worth more than two squadrons of Stormtroopers, much less herself (the idea that she is too good for something is a novelty to Rey, strange and wondrous and altogether impractical, and she marvels at it, at the sense of being personally worth so much as to have herself placed before anyone else.)

Rey is capable; this is a power play, a training exercise, she recognizes with ease.  Her presence on Abraxim isn’t so much that she is required to be there, but so that the First Order can show their most carefully hidden hand; their very own “Aristos Achaion” (“Aristos Achaion” being an ancient phrase meaning to some culture lost in the past the greatest warrior of their people, who’s very presence deterred enemies and broke ranks of those who dared oppose him.  “A worthy inspiration”, Supreme Leader had told her.)

A person who can look the Jedi who think themselves all powerful and omnipotent in the eye and tear down their castle.  More than a person.  A Sith.

Power, heady and grotesque, rises beneath her very skin as she fantasizes parting whole armies on the battlefield with her mere presence, the name “Rey” holding so much sway as to prevent wars.  Or start them.  Her name being just as feared as she does now the name “Skywalker”.

 

It is almost enough to combat Rey’s self loathing and eventual fate of always failing where Skywalker will always succeed.

For the first time in many, many days, she gives herself permission to consider this unfair.

 

Rey hopes he comes.  Rey wishes that the Force can send him to her so she might put him down, once and for all, and achieve some measure of peace, some measure of recognition and true merit in the Master’s eyes.  Ben is the only person in the entire galaxy she’s ever lusted after the spilled blood of so fiercely, so strongly.  Rey has no quarrel with the other padawans that she has been tasked to execute, no death price set above their heads, but if she must barter their lives for the feeling of her saber in her hands, than it is a trade she will accomplish with gladness in her heart, stifling away the remains of her conscience to better serve her future.

To better serve the Supreme Leader.

 

Razach Kamina, the city in which the decisive battle of this “civil war” is being fought out in, is an example of the absolute lowest the sentient species of the galaxy can sink, Rey thinks.  It is awe inspiring, how much destruction and horror people can inflict upon each other.

Her commonplace night terrors and the crimson stained gravel that crunches beneath her boots combine into one, and each step feels as though she is both drowning languidly in jet fuel and running, scrambling like an animal to maintain all four limbs and her head attached to her neck.

It has been a very long time since she has felt such true, immediate fear, and it polarizes Rey further to the thing she came here to do.

 

The Force, which usually ripples for her like a placid lake concealing razor sharp stones and creatures with big, gaping maws, capable of swallowing her  whole, lurking just below the surface, now screams and shudders and breaks against her hastily erected mental shields like how, as she’s seen in a holovid many months ago, waves behave against the rocky beaches they crash against in a brutal storm.

 

There are so many lives being snuffed out like candles in heavy wind, so much death and pain and agony that she feels it all like her own, all at once.  It is too much for her narrow shoulders to hold, too strange and suffocating for her overtaxed brain to comprehend, but she charges forwards anyways, straight into the fray.

 

Flesh melts away if she wishes it so, burned away into nothingness, taking the owner’s life with it.  The Force sings.

She is twelve years old again, and each corpse hitting the ground is as if Rey is cutting off Unkar Plutt’s head one more time, feeling his breath sputter and die against her bloodstained cheeks one more time.

Not quite tall enough to reach most of her opponents’ necks, but Rey makes do anyways.  The blaster shots get redirected to the soldiers who shot them, not cleanly but jaggedly, splitting open bellies and thoracic cavities like overripe fruits, straining to be harvested.

There is more than just blindingly red arterial blood under her fingernails.  Slivers of intestines, membranes, sinew and tendon.   _XI-3197 is going to have an awful time removing everything_ , Rey thinks absentmindedly.

 

A man who tries to attack her from the back is flayed alive, held in place by her darkness as his skin slides from his twitching torso like Rey is pulling the skin off a freshly boiled potato, taking bits and pieces of him with it.  The euphoria of it is unlike any of her previous kills.  It is an intimate affair, lovely and harsh.  Her guard drops for a moment so that she can savor the taste of this vicious power a little more avidly, and in return Rey gets a blaster bolt to the shoulder.

 

The man collapses to the ground like an unloved and forgotten rag doll, nothing more than muscle and bone and spasms of electricity holding him together.

 

Her vision blacks out for a moment in sheer fury, but her body responds when Rey herself is paralyzed.  The tar like energy she calls forth compels her to slowly choke the life out of this new attacker.  Humiliation at leaving herself so obviously open is a poison she willingly swallows, and she expends the brunt of its’ taste at the poor soul who tried, and like everyone else, failed, to silence her heartbeat and stop forth her breath.

Her fingers squeeze together ever closer.  Rey can feel his pulse thrumming beneath the grime smeared pads of her hand.  The would be assassin is 10 feet away.

 

This is the farthest into the Dark she’s gone, the farthest into the lifeless and terrible void, but she has never felt more alive.  Snakes and wasps writhe in the marrow of her bones, eat their way out of her wrecked and scarred body.

 

 _The Force shall free me_.

Rey has never been more whole.

 

One by one, the obstacles standing in her way fall and crumble at Rey’s feet.  She steps in their bodies like they are nothing but mud and dust, unworthy of courtesy burial or a second glance.  Rey no longer moves her feet, no longer pumps bitter air into her chest, but the relief, the sense of utter and complete release, is more than enough to make up for the free will she readily hands over.

What would she do with it anyways?

Mercy?

 

The opposing army parts for her like a sea would part for a god.

In that instant, she feels like a god.   _Look at how I’ve grown._

 

 _There,_ the Force coiled around her shoulders murmurs in her ear.   _There._

 

Rey looks like this: first, her eyes, her neck craning to follow in a fashion best described as more than human, legs not pausing in pursuit of more prey, steering her instead towards better.

 

The immortality crumples away like parchment.  Like the little light surrounded by all that void.

She is afraid, again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did you guys spot all the references?


	6. Abraxim Chainsaw Massacre, Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet, just for a moment. A yellow sky." - Hurricane, Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton: An American Musical)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're sorry. For everything. We did tag all the things okay.

The mere feeling of their hearts, pulsing like one through the Force, ripples in a pond that destroy worlds, the flap of a butterfly’s wing that brings about a hurricane, is enough to send Rey into a frenzy, freezing her blood in her veins and boiling her brain in her fragile, all too human skull.  Laid low by her own mortality, her own helplessness, her own inferiority, skin that could still rip open, eyes that could still cry.  Too human to ever be anything better then the junkyard from which Rey came.

That was the problem, wasn't it.

Rey was all too human in her being, in her body, her emotions that should’ve have been as supernatural as the Force she pretended to be able to command with all the force and severity of a Grand Admiral.

The Padawans wore no fear.  Only righteousness and justice as divine as they were, their Light forcing her shadows to flee and desert her, only leaving Rey, scarred, imperfect, inferior, to stand their gaze, as brutal and as furious as a newborn sun.

For the first time, Rey is confronted with visions of her own death, slumped to the ground like a dog shot dead in the street.

A future she finds herself not entirely opposed to.

A future Rey decides all the same she will not have.  The hollow pieces of herself, left scattered amongst the stars with the family that left her behind, have been gathered up by the benevolent hands of her Master and the Dark, and now restored, Rey cannot bear to imagine herself parting from the utter completion she cannot recall to memory ever feeling before this moment.

Now steadied in her intent, in where she will go next, Rey allows herself to be swallowed into her void, the black no longer strange and unknown but as familiar and akin to her as the keen blade of loneliness.

_ Not loneliness,  _ Rey reminds herself of something Master had once told her.

 

_ Peerlessness. _

 

The Jedi were like a beacon in the dark, deep emptiness of space, one that did not call ships home, but for them to split themselves open in the same vein as the man who’s blood she wore as paint, sticking to her skin like the syrupy sweets Lieutenant General Hux was eternally fond of.

The Light called to her as if Rey was a wayward child, once lost, now found.

The Light forced her away with just as much speed, vermin to be crushed under the glory and goodness and godliness of greater beings, unsympathetic and untouchable as the edges of the universe.

Another body crumbling to dust, another soul unworthy of redemption since birth, another speck of dirt to be wiped away with brutal efficiency from the spotless, pearlescent face of the Light.

A dismissive turn of the head, bigger prey to dismantle, Rey not worth so much as even a passing glance, a singular acknowledgement-

 

_ No _ , she howled into the Dark.   _ Come back.  Come back to me.  Don’t leave me here. _

This time, like all other times, and like what Rey suspected would be every time till she dropped dead, sick of her own machinations and horror soaked deeds, there was no answer.  She was truly alone in this.

The beacon of light pulsed steadily on, unperturbed to her turmoils and her struggle, ignorant of all and any who fell through the cracks in their flawed propaganda of peace and kindness, gentility and syrupy sweet, rotten to the core.

Ignorant to her.

 

There were many vices Rey could find it in herself to forgive of the world that had abandoned her, but ignorance of her existence, her power, the things she could do, the things she could do to people, was the only one she could not stand for a single second.

Rey wasn’t some mistake, some oversight to be swept under the carpet and deleted from comms.

She was here, she lived and she breathed, and Rey swore in that very moment the entire galaxy would remember her.

 

_ Peerless.  Without measure.  Without equal.  My child, that is what you are. _  Resolve is her shield, determination is her spear, the Force is her victory.

 

_ And so it will be _ , Rey decides.  Something behind her irises pulses hot, like a second heartbeat.  Quicker, stronger, inhuman.

Just like her.

Her fingers, the nails cut short and blunt, caked with grime and foul, crushed into the palms of her hands, clenching so hard as to leave crescent moon indents, gleaming bright in the smoke filled light with unholy blood.

 

She cannot deny she is not unhappy at the prospect of bringing low those who would see her crawl in shame through the mud, now having set her mind and will so fiercely on the matter nothing short of a Force-bound command from her Master would stop the raging river of her fury.

Rey moves forward, ignoring the broken figures that crush under her feet.  One step at a time, she forces herself towards the Light, struggling against the energies that bind her still and away, like the similar poles of a magnet, setting two forces into conflict like the speed of light against the gravitational pull of a black hole.

 

_ The Solo boy _ .  He comes to the forefront of her mind, and fast as a whiplash Rey searches him out with the desperation of a starving man searching for the smallest crumb of stale bread.  One by one, she counts the presences here, Rey ignoring the burns growing on the pads of her hands from using the Force to press too long against the Light burning steadily in each.

_ Where are you?  Come to me, Ben Solo.  Reveal yourself to me. _

She needs him to be here.  She needs to prove herself.  She needs to throw her strength against his and come out the victor, smash his royal blood into the dirt and the sand where it belongs, because  _ she deserves this, Rey has earned the Force, Rey has ruined her life, her body, her mind all for all the power she could ever grasp in her smoking palms, killed and killed and destroyed and she was so alone, but not him, he was never alone, he had his mother, his father, Darth Vader, what has he ever done, the boy who can throw away second and third and fourth chances like they’re unworthy of his time, how dare he, why couldn’t I have been- _

Rey is disappointed.

The coward is not here.  He will let his fellows die in his stead, their bodies ever returning to their home planets for the burial they would’ve received had they faced off against any other opponent.  He would sacrifice the lives of his countrymen to live another day in his pretty home with his lightsaber and his uncle and the Skywalker blood flowing through his veins.

_Fine then,_ her blue hot rage having simmered into a thin flame of white.   _He will see._  

 

Like an unspoken command, soldiers and other lesser organisms peel away from her steady path, throwing themselves from having their bodies placed directly under her never ending stare, like Rey was one of the more cruel Stormtroopers in conditioning and they a hapless insect found on board, her cruel hand tilting a magnification lense just so as to reflect gun fire to incinerate the lower life form, for nothing more than to bring her pleasure.

 

_ Look at how I’ve grown. _

 

-

 

Before her, they crumble like shattered glass.  Rey can feel them in the Force, uses the gasoline thick Dark to rip at their clumsily fashioned defenses, smashing through them with all the brutality of a wolf, tearing into a still beating heart.  A wall of children’s playthings and comforts meant for a childhood different from her (and by different, Rey can’t help but be bitter over a more accurate reality; a childhood she was never given), built to stop iron and steel and lightning and her fury, more potent, more corrosive than the Dark that took her in, that raised her up, that placed her upon an untouchable pedestal.

All fates are Rey’s to decide as her ego rears its’ ugly head.

Oh but the first one, that weakling, stumbling forward on unsteady legs through the muck and destruction, staining the hem of his pristine cream robe with congealing blood and the smoke of burning bodies as it dragged on the ground behind him, as gentle and as threatening as a newly birthed animal, his hands trembling as he fumbled with what must have been his training lightsaber,  _ foolish child,  _ he tried.

 

“With the authority granted to us by the Jedi Luke Skywalker, we hereby place you under arrest for your crimes against the Free Peoples of the New Republic.  Denounce your dark way and the Light will forgive you.”  He pronounced, trilling and quavering on every note of his rehearsed-in-front-of-his-pilot-figurine speech like a baby bird, his stance too wide and too confident for the fear running rampant in his eyes, the utter revulsion he attempted to swallow down a throat that must’ve gone dry in the air conditioned shuttle that dropped Luke Skywalker’s padawans here to die.

The absolute sincerity and belief in his hopeless cause like the troopers conditioning worked too well on.

His minders moved quickly, attempting to shush him and pull him behind them before Rey could take much notice.

The damage had already been done.

She’d plucked his mind from beneath the weak shell he’d erected around it, about as hard to get through as a thin layer of colored candy surrounding a disk of chocolate, with just as much resistance beneath her metaphorical jaws, the moment before Rey killed him

 This little one had only numbered a decade, willingly walking into the Skywalker’s capable hand of flesh and hand of metal, the only legend the boy had ever believed in.  He was frightened of her, yes.  But he loved Ben, loved him like an older brother, like family.  Here Rey saw him riding atop his shoulders ( _faster, Ben, faster!_ ) in the bright sunlight, happiness lacing the young one’s golden curls, his eyes round and wide so as to take in the cheerful day around him all the better.

Ben was the hero in his eyes, and he was always there, he’d always save the day, he even called for him now-

With a degree of clinical passivity Rey did not previously know she had possessed, his little hummingbird heart was crushed out of his chest.  Tears gathered in the corners of his wide, far too innocent, too pure, too gentle eyes, but he was dead before they could be let loose.  Rey could see as he tried to curl up in on himself, struggling to hide himself away from her burning and impartial gaze, fetal like in intent and nature.  He collapsed like a marionette, cut loose of its’ strings, his lungs so filled with gurgling liquid he could not let out a single sob for help, matchstick arms and legs twitching unanimated as they refused to support his dead weight a moment longer.  They folded underneath his bloodied torso, twisted into the ground ajar like a doll someone had picked up then promptly thrown aside in a corner, forgotten and as inconsequential as a speck of stardust in a universe full of supernovas.

 

Rey felt the uncontrollable urge to reach out with her soiled hands and cradle his weak, pristine head in them, sink gently to the ground so his last moment were soft and gentle and quiet, just like him.

 

She felt the precise moment he died, sobs stopped up in his chest, his very last moment pain and terror and crying out for  _ Ben, Ben, help me, help me please _ , an infant disappearing lost in the sands of time and memory, no one to remember his name.  All this child had ever brought into the world was good, laughter and fondness (and that’s all he would’ve ever brought, Rey could see, a similarity in all the millions of paths he might have taken if he had not met her), hands ruffling through hair that now lay limp and dead, shoulders others had hugged now hugged around his own body, so he might hold himself and reassure himself that in the end, everything would be alright, Ben was coming, he was safe, he was warm.  Such a small little thing, yet Rey felt his lost as keenly as a knife, slid between her ribs. 

And until the end, he believed she could be saved.  Forgiven.

 

What a foolish boy.

 

_ He learned.  They would all learn, _ she thought, no pleasure, no anger following after.

The Dark rejoiced in the death, and Rey was forced back in, hands shackled to her choices, death nailed into her hands, her bonds restraining her to the tar that no longer sustained her but bore her down against her will.  This is not what she wanted.

_ What do I want? _  Rey asked herself in the last few moments she’d had before the oily black ripped her consciousness from her body.

_ Forgiveness- _

 -

  
On the other side of the galaxy, Ben Solo breaks into a million, irreparable pieces once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering, his name is Nataniyel.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't forget to leave comments for us, and subscribe for updates! Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed :)  
> Disclaimer: the quote in the summary belongs to Donna Tartt, and if it is recognizable, be it a quote or reference, it isn't ours
> 
> Aesthetic for Rey (if you wanna get a sense of how she looks, these edits were made by hvrcules (starbvbe on tumblr) so dw, they are ours): http://starbvbe.tumblr.com/post/142606154052/through-power-i-gain-victory-through-victory-my
> 
> Aesthetic for the Knights of Ren: http://starbvbe.tumblr.com/post/142388384872/they-were-magnificent-creatures-such-eyes-such
> 
> Aesthetic for Ben Solo: coming soon!


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